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boundless energy and self-esteem, and if he was not handsome, someone had neglected to inform him. What he had to sell in this racket was first himself, and he did this as a favor, giving you his smile and his personality at wholesale.
    He shrugged the pack up on his back. It was Ruth he’d never been able to sell. He had hated her and she’d disliked him — when she thought of him at all. It seemed somehow sacrilegious or something to hate her still. But this was the way he felt. She belonged in another world and though she never consciously demonstrated it, Shatner was always made strongly aware of it when he was in her presence.
    And the strange part of it was, he went to her, wagging his tail like a small wet dog, wanting to be friendly because Clay was marrying her. She’d gone to the best women’s college in the East — New England, he thought, without inquiring because it pleased him not to know for sure, and she had absorbed all the predigested, prejudged, preweighed education that they heaped upon her like creamed-chicken on toast.
    To Shatner it seemed the most closed minds were those exposed to that advertised ultimate in culture, because they were told what to despise and they despised it, what to worship and they worshipped it. They learned everything, except to think independently. It amused him that it was forever products of these schools who set out to prove voluminously that Shakespeare never wrote the Shakespearean dramas and comedies: he couldn’t have because he hadn’t the education such work required; as living proof,
they had
the education, and
they
couldn’t do it. Shatner had long ago learned that some of the smartest cookies in show business — even today — were the men who knew all there was about show business, and couldn’t cross a street alone.
    Ruth’s attitude toward him always put him on the defensive, and this was foreign to him, and he despised her for it the first time; and he hadn’t forgotten and he hadn’t forgiven her. But the sickening part was, she hadn’t even realized he hated her and would not have cared if she had known.
    • • •
    The roadway was steep and rough with stones. Firs grew close along the road, but when they looked back they could see the pasture lands below them and the valley marked with orderly farms. They crossed a wooden bridge. The water beneath was the color of clay and turbulent on the smooth stones.
    “Good fishing up here,” Shatner said. “Funny you’ve never been up here before — all the fishing, hunting you’ve done. You sure you’ve never been up to Madden’s before?”
    “I told you.”
    “Well, come on, boy. Get in the mood. I told you this was going to be a fine trip. Different from anything you ever knew. You can fish if you want to. You can hunt if you want to. They got a guide for that. Or you can lay around the cabin. They got the guide’s wife for that.”
    “What are you talking about? I came up here to fish and hunt.”
    Shatner laughed, stumbling slightly on projecting stones. “Sure you did. But wait till you see her. I mean, she’s no Ava Gardner, but after you’ve been up here in this healthful mountain air, she’ll begin to look mighty attractive. And there is nothing — underline nothing — she will deny you.”
    “I thought you said she was the guide’s wife. What do you do with him?”
    Shatner laughed. “Oh, hell. Him? Listen, we send him out to check his traps, or something. One year I was up here with four guys from Universal. We got to drinking, and we got to looking at her and she got to squirming. You know what she did? She sent Madden all the way down the mountain for supplies. In the middle of the night, for God’s sake.”
    “And he went?”
    “I’m telling you. This is paradise up here. Nobody up here says no. Madden’s wife loves to drink. I brought along a few fifths for her. Give her a couple of drinks and she’s wild. Hell, she had a few drinks that night — and the only